Ubuntu 12.10 will include advertisements for products on Amazon. It will look like this - if you search, product suggestions will pop up. This seems like a rather slippery slope to me, and I certainly wouldn't want this on my desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet, or anywhere else. On the web - fine, I'm on your site, not mine - but my desktop is mine, and mine alone. Not that it matters - open source, someone will disable them. Biggest concern: does this mean my search queries get sent across the web?

Oh, come one ... what "fruits of Canonical labour"? are you being serious? Just install Debian and you'll see that Ubuntu is exactly the same as Debian, not mentioning some silly stuff like upstart or Unity which Canonical developed.
They are rather a parasite, and your analogy to communism is highly inappropiate. I know USA has a century-isuess with mythical communism, but come-on!
FLOSS development model is working great and it is benefits both individuals and corporations. There is NO "communism" [BTW - you would be more accurate if you would have say "socialism"] there. There's something you won't understand as long as you're sticking to anarchocapitalistic terms of life - this "something" is kindness, selflessness and altruism.